The 10-month saga of Father Julio Grassi‘s trial for child abuse has finally ended in his conviction and sentence — if indeed it has. The decision to sentence him to 15 years imprisonment while allowing him to remain free pending confirmation of the verdict (another nine of 10 months?) can leave nobody happy — Grassi stands convicted in the eyes of those who believe in his innocence but those who are convinced of his guilt now see him free to return to the scene of the crime.

One must tread very carefully when raising the prospect of Grassi’s innocence. Technically, the man is guilty and to say otherwise is to go down the perilous road of dissident Peronist candidate Francisco de Narváez, who comes dangerously close to saying that justice can be disregarded when suspected of being politically tainted (an attitude defended yesterday by his coalition ally City Mayor Mauricio Macri) — that a court should lay such stress on a tangential link between De Narváez and last year’s ephedrine-smuggling scandal three years after the event and just three weeks before an election seems suspicious timing, to say the least, but how can De Narváez justify making law and order his main campaign plank while taking such a cavalier attitude to a court summons? Yet despite all the attempts to present Grassi as a serial offender with 17 different counts of child abuse against him and 120 witnesses, the fact remains that he was convicted on the evidence of a single witness — the other two boys either wavered in their testimony or their case failed to stand up in court while all the other witnesses were merely passing on hearsay. Furthermore, the Grassi case has been politically loaded from the start, making it a far cry from the open-and-shut cases of priestly abuse occurring with such distressing frequency around the world in recent years. In the previous decade Grassi with his children’s home became something of a poster boy for cleaning up the social débris from Carlos Menem’s privatization and deregulation policies, receiving millions of dollars and generous land grants — between 1997 and 1999 he had a bitter fund-raising clash with a company linked to entertainment personality Susana Giménez which was accused of embezzling charity money.

Nevertheless, the fact that the original charges stretch all the way back to 1996 is more in favour of than against the proceedings — no period of investigation can be too long to avoid impunity for such a heinous crime.